The interest for learning Arabic is increasing recently with millions of Muslims and new coverts who live in the west wanting to learn Arabic to read the Quran and to dig deeper in to Islam or non Muslims who have an interest to learn the language and the culture. In USA that made many American universities to open Arabic classes. While in the Arab world, millions of expats specially the Arab peninsula, live and work.

As there are many resources for learning Arabic, like books to DVDs or private lessons. But Arabicpod.net takes it into a different direction.

Launched in UK, in February 2007 by Mohamed Moshaya from Saudi Arabia and Ehab Saleh from Jordan Arabicpod is mainly a podcast, hosted by Mohamed and Ehab who offer lessons in a fun and enjoyable style making learning Arabic easy and downloadable for free, so you can listen to Arabic lessons using your PC or any MP3 player, iPod, iPhone, or any MP3 supported mobile. According to Ehab, currently Arabicpod podcasts experiance around 100,000 downloads per month.

The podcasts teach both Fusha (classical Arabic) and colloquial lessons. However, the colloquial language used is a standard dialect that can be understood everywhere in the Arab world. Ehab told ArabCrunch

“We tend to avoid terms that are used just in one country and not understood in other Arab countries.”

Mohammad and Ehab record 2 lessons per month two sessions each month, where the session can have up to 5 lessons. They publish 2 lessons every week to thier listeners and each lesson are around 12 minutes each. The lessons suite all levels, they have lessons for beginners, lower intermediate, inter, upper inter and advanced.

So if you want to start learning Arabic or just require a few key phrases to help you on your trips to the world of Arabia. The Beginner’s level would be the best place to start. And once you have been exposed to Arabic and are familiar with the phonics then you can go up the lessons level as you learn and master more Arabic language skills.

Each podcast comes with features that are offered only to premium users, such as a downloadable “PDF transcript” where you can listen to the sentences while reading them; they are very useful to improve the listening skill. And a “PDF Audio transcript” that shows the actual dialogue that is used in the podcast written in Arabic, translated to English and with the pronunciation too. It also contains Key Vocabularies and Supplementary Vocabularies. Each lesson also contains a flash exercise so you can test what you have learned during the lesson.

The website has also SharePoint section which is only available for premium users, where they can upload lessons whether they are application, doc, audio, images, videos etc.

In January 2008 Mohamd and Ehab launched the video podcast section which contains videos that are a reflection of the real life of speaking Arabic, some are showing people in the street greeting each other in Arabic or in restaurant ordering food, other videos are materials that are taken from Arabic TV Programs and were analyzed by the hosts. These videos are also only available for premium users however a free preview for each video cast is available in the site.

As Ehab and Mohammad recorded more lessons that contain more and more translation, Arabicpod launched in November 2008 a dictionary tool that partly auto updated. So the words that are used in the exercises are used also in the dictionary. And it also records what people search for, and the most popular words that people are looking for are given priority to be added as Ehab told me.
Arabicpod also has a shopping section where users can buy t-shirts, books, CDs, keyboard stickers, and rice jewelers.

The job Ehab and Mohammad do, is highly appreciated, these lessons are not easy to do, they take allot of hard work. However, the design of the website is not appealing, and the user generated part functionality can be done in a better way, The Japanese based website Smart.fm provides a good example of a crowed sourced learning portal.

Here is the video of the first podcast lesson recorded by Mohammad and Ehab in March 2007:




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